The Saffron Taste

Sweat was running into my eyes again, so I wiped my forehead with the back of my wrist and went back to checking the risers. Late August weddings are a special kind of punishment. The caterer's tent sits right next to the kitchen trailers, and both of them were pushing about ninety degrees, easy. Two hundred guests, five courses, and a bride's mother who had already walked through twice to look at the saffron rice.

I booked this gig for the money, honestly. That's the plain truth of it. Weddings pay better than restaurant weeks, and I needed a paycheck that didn't come with a manager sighing at me. I'd been in this town five years, and I'd catered for Lucas's mother back when she still had her flower shop in the old neighborhood, and somehow that turned into Dorothy Garcia calling me every time somebody she knew got married. "Dot, you're the only one I trust with the fish course," she'd say, and I'd say yes because I'm weak and my savings account is weaker.

This one was different, though. Porter venue, out at the lake instead of the country club. I'd never worked here before, and I wanted that. A fresh kitchen, a fresh layout, a fresh set of problems to solve. That's what I told myself I was after. A change of scenery and four thousand dollars.

The risers were fine. The duck was resting. The saffron smelled incredible, and I took a second to just stand there and breathe it in, because that's the part of this job I actually love. Then one of the servers knocked a tray of ramekins and I was back to being a foreman instead of a cook.

By the time the third course went out I'd been on my feet eleven hours. I stepped out the back flap of the tent for some air, expecting nothing more than pine smell and a breeze off the water.

Instead I got the whole reception laid out in front of me. White tent, strings of little lights everywhere, the lake going dark and purple behind it. And there, at the very edge of the dance floor, a woman standing barefoot in the grass.

Barefoot, at a wedding. Nobody else was barefoot. She had a green dress on, some kind of shawl, and she wasn't dancing and wasn't drinking and wasn't talking to anybody. She was just standing there, watching the crowd, and then her head turned and she was watching me.

I don't know how else to put it. It felt like being seen. Not glanced at, not checked out. Seen, like she'd been looking for me specifically and had just now found me.

Her eyes caught the string lights and threw them back amber. Not brown. Amber, like tea held up to a window.

I should have gone back inside. I had a course to plate. Instead I stood there in the grass with my jacket off and my sleeves rolled, and she started walking toward me like we'd already arranged it.

"Excuse me," I said, which was stupid, since she was the one approaching. "Can I help you?"

"I hope so," she said. Her voice was low and unhurried. "You're the one who made the rice."

"The saffron rice? Yeah, that's mine."

She stopped an arm's length away and looked at me the way I look at a plate I'm deciding about. "It's the best thing I've tasted in a very long time," she said. "I wanted to tell the person who did it."

"Well. Thank you." I wiped my hands on my apron out of pure nerves. "It's mostly just butter and patience."

"It is not mostly anything," she said, and she smiled, and something about the smile made my chest do an odd little turn. "It's yours."

Before I could figure out what to say to that, a familiar voice cut in from the path.

"Dot! You met Willa already?" Lucas came jogging up with his sleeves unbuttoned and his tie gone, which meant Dorothy had given up on him for the night. "Man, I hoped you two would cross paths."

"You know her?" I asked.

"Since weird old times," he said, dropping an arm around each of us like we were already a set. "Willa, this is Dot. Dot, Willa. She saved my ass at a bonfire about eleven years ago and I've never once gotten a straight answer about how."

"I pulled you out of a fire pit, that's the whole story," Willa said.

"That is not the whole story and you know it," Lucas said, grinning. "Anyway. Dot catered my sister-in-law's baby shower, best food I've ever had at an event. You two talk. I'm being summoned." He pointed back toward the tent, where Dorothy was indeed standing with her arms crossed, and he went off like a man walking to the gallows.

And then it was just the two of us in the dark with the music going behind us.

"Eleven years ago," I said. "So you knew him in his twenties?"

"I knew him," she said, which wasn't an answer, and she knew it wasn't an answer, and didn't seem to care.

She put out her hand then, formal as anything, like we were meeting at a bank. "Willa," she said. "Since he skipped the introduction."

"Dot." I took her hand.

Her fingers were cool, which surprised me, given how hot the night was. And she didn't do the pump-and-release thing. She held on. Her thumb slid across my wrist, deliberate, and settled right over my pulse, and pressed. Not hard. Just enough that I felt my own heartbeat pushing back against her fingers, and I know she felt it too, because her eyes came up from my wrist to my face and stayed there.

"You cook all day," she said. "Standing, lifting, heat. Your pulse is strong."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's an observation," she said. "I make very few compliments. They lose their value."

She let go then, and my wrist tingled where her thumb had been, and I stood there like an idiot with my hand half-extended in the air.

"You should eat something," she said. "You've been feeding everyone else since noon. I watched you."

"You watched me?"

"Mm." She glanced toward the tent, then back at me, unbothered. "I'll find you later, Dot. When the dancing starts up again."

She walked off across the grass without a sound, bare feet on the ground, and I watched her go until the dark took her, and then I stood there another minute with my thumb pressed against my own wrist like I could check whether my pulse was still mine.

I had a wedding to feed. I went back in the tent.

The heat in the tent hit me like opening an oven. Ninety degrees in there, easy, and the trailers weren't any better. I tied my apron back on and got to work on the fourth course, which was a cold cucumber soup, and I put Willa out of my head the way you put a hot pan down, fast and careful.

It didn't take.

Course four went out. Kirk Garcia, Lucas's older brother, got up with a microphone and a beer, and the tent went quiet in that half-hearted way crowds do when they know a toast is coming. I could hear him from the kitchen pass-through, which meant I got the whole thing whether I wanted it or not.

"So, Lucas. My little brother," Kirk said. "I had a whole speech written. Had it on my phone. Then my phone died in the lake, because my nephew was 'just skipping stones, Uncle Kirk, I swear.' So you get the version I'm making up right now."

Laughter. I spooned cream into the saffron sauce base and tried to count stirs instead of listening.

"Lucas at seven years old set our garage on fire trying to make a campfire in a paint can. Lucas at twenty-two backed Mom's car into the lake. Lucas at thirty-six married a woman way out of his league, which proves the kid never learned a thing, and thank God for that."

That got a big laugh. Dorothy was crying already, right up front at the head table, fanning herself with a program. Kirk raised his beer.

"Lucas, I love you, man. And to the bride, welcome to the family, there's no escaping, we tried." Glasses clinked. Kirk sat down to applause and the dancing started back up, slow stuff first.

That was when I felt it, the prickle on the back of my neck, and I looked up and there she was. Willa, seated at a table near the dance floor with her shawl loose around her shoulders, not eating, not drinking, just watching me through the pass-through opening. When our eyes met she didn't look away. She smiled. I smiled back before I'd decided to, and turned back to my station with my ears going hot for reasons that had nothing to do with the trailers.

Course five was the dessert, a lemon thing with berries, and the kitchen crew started breaking down the pastry station around ten. My second, Renee, gave me the look.

"Boss, we're at the coffee and cake part. Go sit down for five minutes, I'm begging you."

"Fine. Five minutes," I said, and I meant five minutes, and then a voice at my elbow said, "There you are."

Willa stood in the kitchen doorway, barefoot, holding two small empty ramekins like she'd borrowed them from a table. A server behind her did a double take but knew better than to shoo a guest out.

"You're in my kitchen," I said.

"It's a tent," she said. "And I knocked." She held one ramekin out. "May I? You told Lucas's mother this was your best course. I heard you through the wall of the trailer. You have a loud opinion of your own food."

"I do not." I did, a little. "It's the saffron cream sauce, it goes with the duck, and the duck is gone. It went out an hour ago."

"You made extra. Cooks always make extra. I can smell it."

She could not possibly smell it, the stuff was lidded and back-burnered. But I pulled the pot over anyway and ladled a spoonful into her ramekin, and she watched my hands the whole time like the ladle was doing something worth studying.

"Taste it," I said. "And tell me it's mostly butter and patience."

"I'll tell you what it is." She took the spoon, and she didn't sip it the way a person does. She took a full spoonful, closed her eyes, and held it in her mouth for a long beat before she swallowed. Then she made a small sound, low in her throat, and my whole face went warm. "Saffron," she said. "And something underneath it I can't name."

"That's a secret."

"Keep your secrets." She held out her hand, palm up, casual as anything. "The sauce dripped. Here."

I looked down. There was a pale gold drop on the back of my wrist, right where my sleeve was rolled, from where I'd tilted the ladle. Nothing. A drop of sauce. But she was still holding her hand out, so I offered her my wrist like an idiot, thinking she wanted